Market shop and Sunday lunch, 25th March, 2012

We’re settling in to our place in the country near Versailles. And despite recent legal rumblings, I heard on Friday that we are here to stay. Forgive me, but  I have to write that again to help it sink in. Until the children leave school, we are here to stay.

It is giddily appropriate to me that this news should come as spring well and truly arrives. All doors and windows onto the garden have been flung open and my kitchen/sitting room/deck/terrasse is forming one, bright peaceful room, soundtracked by birdsong, fragranced by the contents of the oven. Yesterday I allowed myself to open the last of the boxes of kitchen stuff in the garage, and all my old favourite cake tins and cooking stuff have been located and put away again, mindfully and closer to hand.

We’re now about 10 km from St Germain en Laye, where the children are at school, but my shopping habits and favourite addresses have not changed. If anything, there’s a much more definite routine, as the school run gives rhythm to the day so differently from waiting for the children to wander home on foot.

I thought I’d start writing again about feeding the three  children still at home with me, week in, week out. And here, then, is my Sunday market vegetable shop. All 21€ of it. (The asparagus was very tempting this morning, but was mostly from Mexico, Peru and Spain with the first violet topped Provençal spears weighing in at around 17 € a kilo, so I’ll  wait a few weeks more for a true taste bomb.) Just in at Maison Huet were lovely new carrots and turnips. I have rosemary, bay and thyme in my garden but they are looking very sad after such a harsh winter so I bought 1 € sprigs of each, along with the last of Huet’s sage to go with the rolled shoulder of pork lined up for today’s lunch. I picked up the first spring goats’ cheese at The Normandy Stall of Everything, reckoning my 87,50 € shop, with 15 € or so for top ups of bread, eggs etc. should more or less cover all our meals for the week. I’ll keep you posted.

Shoulder of pork à la cocotte with lemon, sage and miso.

For 6 , with leftovers

5 minutes preparation, 1hr 30 cooking.

1 boned  and rolled (or not but you’ll need a bigger pot) shoulder of pork , 1.5/1.75 kg
1 small sprig of sage
1 or 2 cloves garlic, peeled, 1 onion, chopped.

grated zest of a lemon, salt, pepper, olive oil, red miso paste (optional)

Make a paste in a mini blender with the garlic, lemon, sage leaves and a tablespoonful or so of olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste and rub the meat all over with the paste. Let it stand for 30 minutes or so (you can wrap it up in cling film and leave itto sink in properly overnight, but I was in a hurry)
Heat the oven to 180°. Heat some oil in a heavy based casserole dish and brown the meat all over. (I also added a chopped onions at this stage) Deglaze the pot with enough water to come up to about 2cm on the side of the meat. Bring it to a simmer, put the lid on, slip the pot into the oven and cook for about an hour and a half.
Remove the meat from the pot, keeping it warm before slicing.
Pour the cooking juices from the cocotte – remove some of the fat and reduce them.  If you  add a heaped  teaspoon of hatcho miso at this stage, it will make all the difference to the taste.
Serve with new turnips and carrots, simply peeled and steamed.

PS. I now have a very large oven, so I turned it up to 200°c  to let a banana bread and an oat and apple crumble cook alongside the meat.

Martine Kurz

Pavlova at Café Pouchkine by ELLE ‘s Martine Kurz. on her great tumblr ‘Les Choses by MK.’  It’s enough to make me want to start using Instagram – almost.

Delicious Australia, April issue.

TRISH DESEINE’S ULTIMATE CHOCOLATE RECIPES

Talk to Paris-based food writer Trish Deseine about chocolate and it seems that she sees enjoying it as a near-spiritual experience. “The singer Adele says that when she sings ‘Someone Like You’, there’s a sort of pact with her audience – everyone recognises and shares the emotions she sings about. Well, chocolate does that, too,” explains Trish. “Its pleasure is so universal that even complete strangers seem to enter into some kind of communion when they eat it together.”
Moving to France in the 1980s, she gave up a career in marketing in 2000 to sell her chocolates by mail-order from home. It wasn’t long before her unique style was spotted by publishers and her writing and TV careers took off. These days, Trish divides her time between Paris, a country town near Versailles and Languedoc, where she’s converting an old bakery into a holiday home. There are also plenty more cookbooks on the horizon: “It’s what I love doing most.”

Oreo & peanut butter pie

Serves 8

20 Oreos (or other chocolate cream biscuits)
175g unsalted butter
400g crunchy peanut butter
175g icing sugar, sifted
200g good-quality dark chocolate, chopped

1. Finely crush biscuits in a food processor. Melt 75g butter and combine with biscuits. Press into the base and sides of a 24cm loose-bottomed tart pan and chill for 30 minutes until firm.
2. Combine peanut butter and icing sugar in a bowl and spread in the tart base.
3. Place chocolate and remaining 100g butter in a clean bowl over a pan of simmering water (don’t let the bowl touch the water). Stir until melted, then cool slightly. Spread over the peanut butter layer and chill for 30 minutes until firm. Cut into slices and serve.

Bill Granger portrait: Anson Smart
Vegetarian bolognese photography: Jonathan Gregson
Oreo & peanut butter pie photography: Jeremy Simons
Oreo & peanut butter pie styling: David Morgan

LINK TO FULL PAGE HERE

Eugenia Maximova

Review: St John Hotel, London.

It’s sad, I find, that along with the usual casualties at the end of love affairs, come all the  places which hold memories of them. Poor, unsuspecting restaurants, bars, hotels, (also houses, stately homes,  gardens, galleries, theatres, streets and entire arrondissements in my thin-skinned case) are bluelisted, until time has spread its balm where love has burned.

St John Hotel, off Leicester Square in London is the perfect place to stay, then, when you need warm, not hot. In a brilliant location, just off Leicester Square, it has a brisk, institutional atmosphere, naturally not unlike the St John restaurants,  protecting you from the Chinatown clamour outside. The mildly claustrophobic building, (the roadworks outside are not helping)  the staff’s eastern European accents and white uniforms could make you wonder if there might be padding on the walls of your cell, er, room. But no, of course not silly.  The floors are  lino. There are no wardrobes or any drawer-bearing pieces of furniture, but wooden pegs all around the room, which appeal massively to this bordelique traveller who rarely unpacks her suitcase anyway. It’s all very comfortable , reasonably priced and, I suspect, easy to hose clean.  Also a great bed, mountains of pillows, solid, roomy bathroom with fast water, make up mirror (Dean Street Townhouse I’m looking at YOU) but with NO LIGHT (ultimate kindness for the over 45s) decent smellies, properly free wifi and an excellent double espresso with hot milk on the side please, and a smile thank you, in less than 5 minutes.

But it’s the food here which brings true solace, in a no-nonsense, nanny knows best way. For Nanny St John KNOWS how you like the little things during, this, your fleur de peau convalescence. The pipIng hot, morning after  bacon sandwich, whose butter, whilst dripping helpfully through the many folds of bacon, has not quite soaked through the whole thickness of the (epic) bread, the baked to order madeleines which , like the espresso, arrive in less than 5 minutes, the molten rarebit which strips the roof of your mouth with one bite of glorious self-punishment, and death hastening ‘devilled pigskin’  (photo) for which Adrià would doubtlessly learn, at last, to speak English, or Nathan Mirthvoid get a grant from Harvard, just to understand how Fergus Henderson GOT IT THAT WAY. And  all this, for the moment, might not be the love you want, but it’s sure as hell the love you need.